Mark Walker, with Colorado Brownfields Foundation, discusses the potential redevelopment of the Great Western Sugar Mill in Longmont during a public meeting at the Longmont Museum & Cultural Center on Thursday.
(
Greg Lindstrom
)

LONGMONT -- For 36 years, the question has been the same: what should Longmont do with the old sugar mill? By Thursday night, some were tired of waiting for an answer.

"If we're just going to talk about it for 30 years, you might as well forget it, let it all fall down," said one man in an audience of 35 at the museum Thursday. "Longmont needs to take the bull by the horns and do something."

It's not uncharted territory. Longmont's old Great Western Sugar factory is one of 22 or 23 (the counts vary) that spread across Colorado in the early 20th century. All but one have shut down, but some have found a new life, said Mark Walker of the Colorado Brownfield Foundation, and Longmont's could be one of them.

David Starnes, the redevelopment program manager for the city of Longmont, listens as Mark Walker, with Colorado Brownfields Foundation, discusses the potential redevelopment of the Great Western Sugar Mill in Longmont during a public meeting at the Longmont Museum & Cultural Center on Thursday.
(
Greg Lindstrom
)

"I call these the dinosaurs of the Eastern Plains," Walker said as part of Thursday's "Sweet Success?" talk on the sugar mill, teaming up with Longmont's redevelopment program manager David Starnes. "They're all over the place, they're really sad stories. But they have such potential."

Why? Well, good rail service and industrial-strength electrical utilities don't hurt. Neither does the position of Longmont's own "dinosaur" -- just over the city limits, right by the eastern gateway, with a far-flung view of the Front Range.

What does hurt is lime. Lots of it. Although there's been no firm numbers since the factory's closure in 1977, the city estimates that between 500,000 and 700,000 cubic yards of lime -- a waste product of the sugar beet process -- sits on the 88-acre site. And though lime isn't carcinogenic, it is unstable and would have to be removed before any serious building work could be done.

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"You can dig a hole 2 feet in one spot and it'll be like talcum powder," Walker said. "But you can move six feet over there and it'll be like snot: gluey, gummy and it doesn't give up its water easily."

Add in asbestos removal -- and sugar beet factories used a lot of asbestos for fire prevention -- and the time and money needed mount up fast. In Eaton, Walker noted, cleaning up its sugar factory site has already taken four years and $8 million to $9 million. And it's still not done.

So why bother? Because even the hardest cases can become success stories. Greeley at one point found out that 70,000 cubic yards of soil on the site of its sugar factory had been contaminated by asbestos. But once the cleanup was complete, the city was able to draw a Leprino Foods cheese plant to the site. Similarly, Fort Collins has been able to turn the brick-and-cement structures of its own plant into city buildings.

In Longmont's case, Starnes said, it's one of the few opportunities the city has for a large-scale project as it approaches "buildout," its natural limit of expansion.

"But for a huge variety of reasons, nothing has happened," he said. "It's a challenging market."

Some in the audience had suggestions of their own for the Longmont site: an aircraft museum, a residential/commercial development, putting a high-priced restaurant and bar on top of one of the silos. But the question of the lime loomed ahead of all of those and there, resident Joe Parker said, is where the city would need to take the lead. Rather than wait for it to be economical to ship the lime to Cemex or another company for concrete production, Parker said, the city or county would need to find its own uses for the lime, or even mandate its use in local government projects.

"We benefited from creating that waste," he said. "Now we ought to find a use for it. There is a way to deal with it. It costs money. Deal with it."

Similar plants in Minnesota and Michigan were able to deal with the lime by giving it to farmers, an option not available in Colorado where the soil is alkaline rather than acidic.

The sugar mill has not been annexed into Longmont, but has been part of a city urban renewal area since 2006.

Answers can be found, Walker said, even though the problem will take patience to work out.

"This particular site is not complex," he said. "But it does definitely present some hurdles."

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